Con Ed Went Back on Promise Over Emissions, Neighbors Say

Tom Joyce, who lives above his Radio Mexico Cafe at 259 Front St., has spent hours of his spare time over the past year researching the health effects of electro-magnetic fields (EMFs). He bought a device that measures EMFs and has been checking the levels in his apartment and on his block.

Joyce, and many of his neighbors, who live on the block bounded by Peck Slip, Dover and South streets, are fuming over what he recently found.

Joyce’s building shares a wall with a Con Edison substation. To make up for a substation destroyed by 7 World Trade Center’s collapse, Con Ed added new transformers to the station last spring. Since then, EMF and noise emissions have increased significantly, the residents said, and Con Ed has not kept its promise to maintain the EMF levels it had projected before the new transformers went in. Joyce and a Con Ed official detected higher EMF levels in the streets around the substation in October than in February.

“You said you would hit those targets and now you’re trying to weasel out of it,” Joyce told Con Ed officials last month at a meeting of Community Board 1’s Seaport/Civic Center Committee.

The Con Ed officials replied that they had committed only to meeting projected levels in the residents’ building, not on the street.

“We can’t control the magnetic fields on the streets,” said Richard Fogarty, Con Ed’s chief substation engineer. He said those EMFs could be caused by non-Con Ed sources, such as underground cables.

“You guys are lying,” Joyce shot back. “All we want is the numbers that were promised.” Even in the apartments, he said, EMF levels measured recently by Con Ed exceeded projections.

The company said it will meet those targets when it finishes installing protective shielding on the wall shared by the substation and the building. That work was supposed to be finished by last spring; now Con Ed says the shielding won’t be in until next April.

Residents are also incensed about the increase in noise from the substation.

“We couldn’t open our windows in the summer,” complained Rick Liss, who lives across the street at 244 Front St. “And my windows shake.”

The residents say that Con Ed agreed earlier this year that the noise on Front Street was high and pledged to muffle it. But last month the company said the noise increase is negligible and there is little it can do.